Date: 11 Aug 96
From: John Whiting <100707.731@CompuServe.COM>
To: "\"Jerry Brown\"" <WTP@SIRIUS.COM>
Cc: Pacifica Foundation <pos@pacifica.org>,
Subject: Jerry Brown and Pacifica

"We The People" is in a unique position which is not entirely of its own making. It has the good fortune to be the brainchild of a high-profile public figure who, whether idolized or ridiculed, has always been newsworthy. Like Henry Adams in nineteenth century Boston, Jerry Brown learned politics at his father's knee; unlike Adams, he was willing and able to translate this knowledge into power.

In America today, Jerry Brown is alone among those who have held high office in that he has chosen to toss aside virtually every conventional opinion which is thought to be a prerequisite for election. Like a Berkeley radical of the 1960's, he pursues ideas as entities in themselves in the way a poet seeks out fertile metaphors. There appears to be no plan of attack, no hidden agenda which has determined that a particular line will manipulate his audience into a given position. If he has a "focus group", it is made up of very peculiar people, vestigial remnants of a left consensus long since swallowed by oblivion.

It is this very eccentricity which gives Jerry Brown his celebrity. His appeal to journalists does not lie in his opinions, which are shared by a number of powerless and anonymous theoreticians, but in the fact that these opinions are held by a former governor and son of a governor of the most powerful state in the Union. Otherwise "We The People" would be just another think-tank - certainly not notorious enough for the New Pacifica to give it a daily slot.

It is this dichotomy which makes Jerry Brown's opinions newsworthy, not the opinions in themselves, which are out of fashion. In the rise and fall of political tides, we are at an ebb of radicalism in which independent thought and experimental politics are discredited. This is an age of walls, of fortresses, of boundaries. The systolic heartbeat is contractive; doors and minds are locked against invaders.

This is the national - indeed, world - mood which has shrunk Pacifica's traditional audience. To reverse the falling Arbitron ratings, it has been deemed necessary to follow the audience along the simplistic highways of commercial popular culture. Efforts to "reach" an audience have only succeeded in diluting the essence which brought KPFA into being and gave it substance. Perhaps a braver and, in the long run, more productive decision would have been to emulate the mediaeval monasteries, who kept the fruits of culture and of intellect preserved until society was once more ready to enjoy them. "Two or three about the temples," wrote Ezra Pound, "were enough to keep alive the old religion."

The choice which Pacifica has made is gradually eroding its very reason for existence. Its stations were not intended to be merely left-leaning mirrors, but complex many-faceted prisms refracting the rays of art and politics so as to reveal a spectrum of colors not visible to the naked eye. Their shiny new monochrome surfaces conceal more than they reveal and Jerry Brown's prominent position among their reflected images is due not so much to his relevance or his courage as to his notoriety.

John Whiting
London